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UK government advises deleting emails to save water

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Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#71

Post by pjc50 »

tomatocracy wrote: post #63
johnisgood wrote: post #14

From the website: HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. Take shorter showers. Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amo…

> Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. I suspect this one dwarfs the others. It's why some water companies have campaigned to ban new dual flush toilets in the UK (there's a common failure mode for dual flush toilets which results in the tap to the cistern not properly switching off once it's full).

Ironically, dual flush toilets are supposed to be a water saving measure.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#72

Post by jlokier »

dylan604 wrote: post #51
reedf1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that SSDs are in the sub-watt territory when idle. So ironically the act of deleting the email instead of keeping the drive in steady-state will likely use significantly more power.

How often do you think a device is idle in a data center? My guess is not very often if ever.

Often, in a system with a large number of drives where actively-used data and cold data are automatically migrated to active and mostly-idle drives respectively.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#74

Post by jackwilsdon »

bhaney wrote: post #53
benjojo12 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email has a specific carve out on the online safety act

HTTPS-over-SMTP soon?

Richard Stallman is pretty much already doing this!

> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me

https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html#internetuse

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#75

Post by dylan604 »

lupusreal wrote: post #65
dylan604 wrote: post #31

I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else. One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fre…

Closed loop water cooling probably doesn't make a lot of sense at scale; radiators aren't very efficient at the relatively cool temperatures this sort of system would be operating at. Maybe if the water loop was cooled by refrigeration systems? That would be expensive though.

Closed loop water systems is a common form of cooling in large/commercial buildings. Typically, a large chiller unit on the roof with the cold water piped throughout the building connected to individual blowers. I've been told it is much more cost efficient.

If that's not how they are using the water, then what are they using it for? Swamp coolers?

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#76

Post by igouy »

dylan604 wrote: post #59
mytailorisrich wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "standard" method used by East Asians is to wash the rice several times until water is clear before cooking. This waste water is said to be good to water plants with and accounts for most of the water needed.

Interesting. I was unaware of that being a thing. Is there any point/benefit to that?

Rinse rice a couple of times and the water goes from cloudy to clear. One might imagine that the rice clumps together less and has a "cleaner" mouth-feel.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#77

Post by cactacea »

jl6 wrote: post #34

Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article: > The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall. So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.

> Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another.

By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#78

Post by pjc50 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #25
johnisgood wrote: post #14

From the website: HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. Take shorter showers. Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amo…

> Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. This assumes water is inconsistent. Once the rain butt is full, there's no more benefit. And then in a long dry season once it's emptied, it's not saving any more. > Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. If you're on a water meter you're already incentivised to fix this - so a better answer is water meters. > Use water from t…

I agree. Apparently the UK average daily water usage is ~140l, so "fix leaks" dwarfs all the others.

If you're irrigating your garden, that's also going to be a big one, but quite often you get a hosepipe ban in the dry season anyway.

Someone with a water meter should try these measures and see if they notice a difference; I bet they don't. The data center one is of course unmeasureable by the individual.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#79

Post by jncfhnb »

arkensaw wrote: post #54
bee_rider wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers are pretty clever, but salt water is some nasty stuff.

Desalination is cheap though. It's just never really been needed at scale in the UK because of rainfall. Maybe it's time to reassess

Desalination is expensive
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